Google scholar tracks scholarly literature online across many disciplines and sources, including theses, books, abstracts and articles. Besides being a source for searching literature, they provide also a statistic on citations of a given paper or an author.

Citation indices are in practice since 1873 (Shepard’s Citations) but in earlier times have been mostly limited to a specific discipline or a publisher. With Google scholar the scope of considered publications is now much larger which on the one hand gives a more comprehensive feedback on how many people have cited your paper at least but on the other hand the index is also affected by less significant publications. While this is an ongoing discussion, citations indices will remain as one of the main quantitative analysis methods for assessing the impact of a scientific publication.

Google Scholar Citations recently announced that researchers can now create their own author profiles, which enable the possibility to assign authors to their respective universities. Some researchers from University of Klagenfurt are already present.

Unless a researcher has a registered a profile, Google scholar does not show metrics like the famous h-index or g-index, but these can be accessed online at scHolar index which is using the database of Google scholar.